26082020

Spent the morning tuning various stat ticks. I’m pretty satisfied with where all of them are now as is: the next major tuning will probably take place after the first playtest (which I tentatively hope to get done by the end of September). I also fixed a minor glitch with the lighting system that incorrectly drew over certain ground surfaces in room without a parallax layer present.

I spent the rest of the day working on a draft of the objectives system, which I think I’ve basically finalised now. A new option will be added to the actions menu (I haven’t figured out the exact name yet but it’ll probably be something like “Review thoughts” or something), which will put Avery into a special resting state. Once she’s in the state, the player will be able to select different parts of her body – right now, I’ve got her head for high-level thoughts such as objectives, her stomach for hunger/thirst/excretion, her heart for fatigue, and no selection for general willpower – in order to “examine” certain thoughts in closer detail. These thoughts will then float around (I haven’t settled upon a final presentation yet), and the player can click on them to reveal even further details if applicable. For example, when reviewing high-level objectives, she’ll be presented first with the general topic (eg “signal”), which will then expand into several sub-thoughts (in this case, indicating the next available action in that subplot). The presentation of the thoughts changes based on their urgency, and unattended ones (for example, if the player fails to complete certain objectives from the previous day) will accumulate.

I’m pretty excited to see it come into form, and I’ve already gotten the sprites drawn out tonight. The actual technical implementation, at least for the UI, should be pretty straightforward; the backend’s gonna be a little more complicated but I think I’ll wait a bit until I’ve developed at least one full subplot before starting work on it proper, just so I can have a general structure. Working on the outline has also really helped me develop a very concrete sense of the moment-to-moment narrative structure, and has solidified my upcoming work substantially.